Wind farm visual impact assessment – part 3

An exploration of methods for assessing the visual impact of proposed wind farms, in several parts.
wind farms
Author

Tim Churches

Published

September 18, 2024

Warning

The viewshed maps on this page are very detailed and may take quite a while to display in many web browsers, and may not render at all on small devices such as smartphones or tablets. They are provided purely for development purposes, and final versions will be optimised for faster display.

Calculating compound viewsheds

In this step, we will calculate the cumulative viewshed for all of the 47 turbines proposed for the Palings Yard wind farm, assuming each one is 170.5m tall near the tip of the blade.

We can examine the distribution of the number of turbines visible from each pixel in the cumulative viewshed raster. Note that zero turbines are visible from the vast majority of pixels – these have been excluded from the chart below.

The map below shows the cumulative viewshed (with Earth curvature and atmospheric refraction corrections) for all 47 of the proposed Palings Yard wind turbines each 170.5m tall near the tip of the uppermost blade, at the indicated positions, shaded by the number of turbines visible from each point on the map.

Next steps

In the next in this series of blog posts we will compute the full visual impact metric set out in this paper.

Citation

BibTeX citation:
@online{churches2024,
  author = {Churches, Tim},
  title = {Wind Farm Visual Impact Assessment -\/- Part 3},
  date = {2024-09-18},
  url = {https://oberon-citizen.science/posts/2024-09-18-wind-farm-visual-impact-assessment-part-3/},
  langid = {en}
}
For attribution, please cite this work as:
Churches, Tim. 2024. “Wind Farm Visual Impact Assessment -- Part 3.” September 18, 2024. https://oberon-citizen.science/posts/2024-09-18-wind-farm-visual-impact-assessment-part-3/.